Imagination Technologies has been one of the leading suppliers of mobile GPU solutions for years, but after years of strong growth it now appears that the outfit is about to plateau. Imagination has revised its forecast for shipments of mobile SoCs with its GPUs and the company now expects between 520 and 550 million units will be shipped this year. Originally it was hoping for 580 to 630 million.

Although these are impressive figures, it should be noted that mobile GPU IP doesn't add much to the price of a SoC. In fact, chipmakers often pay as little as ten cents per unit, although high-end designs cost a bit more.

This is indicative of a wider problem for Imagination. Its design wins usually come in the form of high-end gear. For example, it has been supplying Apple with top notch GPUs for years. However, the company doesn't make that much money in the low end space, which is dominated by ARM Mali GPUs and it is attracting players like Qualcomm and Vivante. According to Reuters, Imagination hopes to gain share in that particular segment in the second half of the year.

It will not be easy. ARM's new Mali cores are impressive and ARM can leverage its position to gain plenty of design wins. Vivante has made a lot of progress over the last year or so and it has gained a lot of share. Qualcomm has stepped up its focus on low-end and mid-range SoCs with integrated LTE and Adreno graphics.

The two elephants in the room are Intel and Nvidia. Their market share in the mobile SoC space is tiny at the moment, but this may be about to change. Intel is throwing a lot of money at hardware partners in an effort to secure more sales in the tablet space. Over the next couple of years it might go after the smartphone space as well, especially once it starts integrating LTE.

Nvidia poses a different kind of threat. It is planning to start licensing Maxwell IP for mobile SoCs. While the company's market share in the SoC world is low at the moment, it could become a force to be reckoned with in the mobile GPU IP space.

We spent a fair amount of time chatting with Frido Garritsen who is the chief architect at Vivante Corporation as we wanted to learn a bit more about the upcoming GC 7000 Vega-based GPU. The idea came after the news that chip that will show include of SoCs in 2014, the GC 6400 can beat Tegra 4 and Adreno 330 in most benchmarks. You can read that part here.

Vivante GPUs have made it to the Chromecast and a few other interesting devices that delivered solid volumes, earning Vivante a 10-percent market share in the mobile GPU space. The company is now working on a new GPU called the GC 7000 and it should be ready in 2014. GC 7000 has two times as many shaders as the GC 6400, up from 16 to 32 in the GC 7000, promising a huge performance increase. This is a 28nm design that definitely leaves Adreno 330, Tegra 4, and Mali T628 in the dust as it tends to run much faster.

We don’t know how this GPU measures up against the new Logan Kepler based GPU, Adreno 400 or a few other 2014 GPU design, but we have a feeling that Vivante’s GC 7000 will become very competitive in the future. The new GC 7000 chip has an improved load balancer so it can keep all the cores and shaders occupied. It basically decides which core takes the next load of processing. GC 7000 is flexible architecture where the design enables adding up to 16 cores where each carries 16 shader cores that are capable of doing geometry, vertex compute and tessellation. The maximum amount of cores would be 256, but that might be too hard to do at 28nm, as it would take up way too much space. However, it illustrates how scalable the design really is.

The new GC7000 GPU has Open CL 2.0 and support for Shader model 4.0 from DirectX 10 as well as Open GL ES 3.0+ and desktop Open GL 3.x and 2.x. The time to market of GC 7000 is a bit more complicated. The GC 7000 will be ready for SoC customers by the middle of 2014, while the end customers will be able to buy devices based on these chips in the 2015 refresh cycle.

It takes a long time from the time the GPU IP is designed to see it up and running in some SoC products, but it’s good to know that mobile GPU market is getting really competitive with Nvidia Tegra, Qualcomm Adreno, ARM Mali, Imagination Technologies PowerVR who are currently the players to beat and Vivante - closing in fast on price aware designs such as Google Chromecast.

Qualcomm’s Adreno 330 GPU will be replaced by new Adreno 400-series parts and naturally the new generation will be faster than the one that sits inside the Snapdragon 800.

Our sources are telling us that Adreno 400 is expected with the new version of Snapdragon that is set to debut in early 2014. Traditionally Qualcomm uses CES to showcase its new chips and CES 2014 starts on January 7th, so it sounds like the right time for it.

The only key detail that we learned about Adreno 400 is that despite a significant increase in GPU performance the chip won't have a compute part and it doesn’t support OpenCL. Many will see this as a handicap, but to be honest we see limited uses for OpenCL in mobile chips, at least for now.

Nvidia's Logan comes with Open CL 1.1 as well as Open GL 4.4 support. Adreno 330 can push 3.6 Gigapixels a second making it one of the fastest GPUs in mobile market, capable of going head to head with the Tegra 4. Adreno 400 naturally ends up faster.

Then again we expect that Logan Tegra 5 has what it takes to dominate the mobile GPU market in 2014. Let’s not forget about PowerVR 6-series parts, ARM’s recently announced Mali 700-series or Vivante’s upcoming mobile GPU designs, either.

Unlike the AMD-Nvidia duopoly in the PC GPU market, right now there are five players vying for the top spot in the mobile space and things are bound to get interesting.

We have mentioned that Vivante, a relatively new mobile GPU IP provider, grew its market share from 0.3 percent last year to 9.8 percent in the first half of 2013. When we say mobile here we mean tablets and phones and you can check out the original story here.

Vivante had several important design wins with Google Chromecast, Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 as well as Huawei’s Ascend P6 mobile phone. Vivante IP found its place several interesting products, but more importantly the company’s future roadmap looks good.

A GPU called GC6400, based on new Vega core, comes with 16 shares, 533 million triangles a second and up to 8 Gigapixels a second and 128Gigaflops. All this gets placed in 16.4 square millimetres using the 28 nanometre High Performance process. Is shows quite good performance for its 800MHz clock and 1GHz shader clock.

The rest of specification includes support for Android 4.0 to 4.4 and beyond, Windows 8 RT and Windows Phone, OpenGL ES 3.0 and below, DirectX11 with 9.3 subset, along with Shader model 3.0 and Open CL 1.2 and draft 2.0. It also supports desktop Open GL version 3.x and 2.x, WebGL and render filter script.

Vivante’s GC6400 GPU should end up significantly faster than Nvidia’s Tegra 4. The numbers that we saw for Tegra 4 are as follows: in GL Benchmark 2.7 Nvidia’s Shield console scores 21 FPS, in HP’s Slatebook 10 X2 (Tegra 4, passively cooled) scores 17 FPS while the Vivante GC6400 scores 30 FPS in the same test. Adreno 330 from Qualcomm scores 26 FPS in the same test, while ARM’s Mali T628 GPU scores 24 FPS. Vivante is clearly the fastest of the lot.

In GL Benchmark 2.5 Shield Tegra 4 scores 56 FPS, HP Slatebook 10 X2 scores 50 FPS while GC6400 from Vivante scores 70. Adreno 330 scores 58 FPS while Mali T628 MP8 scores 72 FPS in the same test. Mali 628 MP8 wins by a small margin, but this still shows that Vivante is an upcoming player in the IP GPU market.

We know that Nvidia will soon introduce a significantly faster Kepler based graphics in the Tegra 5, but at the same time this leaves Vivante plenty of room to become a graphics runner up that can make a big difference in the market. Getting the Cromecast deal that will result in millions of shipped chips is a romantic Silicon Valley success story.

Imagination Technologies, the producer of PowerVR GPUs used in heaps of SoC designs, is still the world’s leading supplier of mobile GPUs, according to Jon Peddie Research. Imagination took the lead when it started providing GPUs for Apple and it never looked back. The new Apple A7 SoC is the first chip to use the company’s new Rogue 6-series GPU and it won’t be the last.

However, Imagination has lost a bit of ground since last year. Its market share in the first half of 2012 was a whopping 52 percent, but a year later it was down to 37.6 percent. Things should improve for Imagination as more Rogue designs appear.

As a result or Imagination’s dip, Qualcomm and ARM muscled in to seize more share over the last year. Qualcomm’s GPU share went up from 29.3 to 32.3 percent, while ARM saw an even bigger gain – going from 13.5 to 18.4 percent in the same period.

Nvidia was the biggest loser. Its share dropped from 4.9 percent to just 1.4 percent over the last year. Since Nvidia doesn’t license its GPUs, the number indicates a steep shipment in Tegra SoCs, which comes as no surprise.

The biggest winner, however, was not ARM or Qualcomm. It was Vivante, which had an 0.3 share last year, but ended the first half of 2013 with a 9.8 share. Vivante IP is used in a growing number of SoCs, but the company doesn’t get much coverage as most of its clients are focused at non-consumerish, embedded markets

Vivante currently provides GPU tech for Marvell, Freescale, Rockchip and Vivante's latest consumer design win we can think of is Google’s Chromecast, which packs a Marvell DE3005 SoC and Vivante GC1000 graphics. You can check out a list of Vivante's design wins here.

What’s in store for the second half of the year and beyond?

We believe Imagination will rebound with Rogue and Nvidia has a chance to make up some lost ground as more T4/T4i designs emerge. However, when Nvidia starts licensing Maxwell IP to other SoC builders, it could gain share overnight. Furthermore, if that triggers a response from AMD we could see the old green-red rivalry extend to the mobile space and who wouldn't want to see that happen? (Imagination, ARM, Qualcomm, Vivante. Ed)

Also, here’s an interesting statistic. The market for SoCs with GPUs grew 81 percent from the first half of 2011.